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Esports, or professional competitive video games, are an already popular and rapidly growing medium with strong appeal to many students, especially young males. Presently, these games are under-utilized in academic contexts, disconnected from schooling or seen as a distraction to learning. In this project, we leverage student interest in esports by creating a new, authentic competitive high school esports league and to match this league development with rigorous academic content. By wedding student interest and participation in the robust esports community, our work will improve our understanding of competitive gaming, develop connections between game practices and school content (especially STEM), and improve esports communities through positive leadership and mentoring. In this symposium, we present our ongoing progress after six months of development, detailing key elements of the program including curriculum, coaching, league structure, and research.

Constance Steinkuehler is a Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine where she investigates cognition and learning in multiplayer videogames in domains including literacy, scientific reasoning, mathematical reasoning, computational literacy, collective problem... Read More →